


like stars through the soul

by TolkienGirl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, BB-8 is a Jack Russell terrier, Basically Poe Dameron is the Scarlet Pimpernel, England (setting), F/M, French Revolution, Gen, I don't know what even happened here, Love at First Sight, Pre-Regency, Reylo - Freeform, there are also little quotes and Easter Eggs sprinkled throughout, there is bromance, this may be the best thing I've ever done or the worst, title from Victor Hugo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:42:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8026540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Everyone has secrets; some are trying to save the world, some are trying to end it, and some fall in love in the space of a moment.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MJosephine10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MJosephine10/gifts).



> "Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love..." Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

Lady Maz's grounds are so enormous that, if Rey runs far enough, she can almost imagine that these green swards were always her home. She can find turf so deep and mossy that she sinks nearly to her ankles; she can watch silver trout skimming through the stream with a splash and a ripple; she can watch the clouds form towers by day and the winking stars arrange their constellations by night. She can do all this and call it home, and someday, she promises herself, she will believe it.

The truth is that Rey has lived four years in England as the ward of Lady Maz. No one ever mistakes her for a daughter; Lady Maz is short and broad-faced with kind, wide-set eyes, dressing more simply than the latest London fashions dictate. Rey dresses simply, too, but she is slender and tall, and if the charming Monsieur-turned-Mr. Dameron's accounts have any truth, the young gentlemen of the neighborhood are beginning to take notice.

Rey blushes at the memory of his words, and folds up her book. If she is right, that is Mr. Dameron coming up the broad stone walkway now, with Bébé, his ginger and white terrier prancing along beside him.

"Mr. Dameron," Rey exclaims, delighted. She is always delighted to see him; Finn will be too, if he is back from his morning ride. "Lady Maz will be happy to see you!"

Poe Dameron bows, and tilts his gaze up at her before he straightens, unstudied smile in full effect. "Miss Ridley," he murmurs. "I do wish I came for an afternoon of Lady Maz's tea, and perhaps a stroll with yourself and Bébé—but alas. I am on a much more ostentatious errand."

 

"Invited to Baron Snoke's ball?" Rey says, speaking quite out of turn (though no one minds).

"A great honor," Lady Maz intones, but her eyes slide to Poe's for an instant, and Rey knows that there is something hidden beneath the words.

"His new protégé will be the guest of honor," Poe adds dryly, fingers toying with Bébé's collar. "So, Lady Maz, what say you?"

"Baron Snoke, the richest man in the country, some say." Maz sips her tea. She sets down the cup with care, and lets the silence grow around them. Then she speaks again. "Who are the poorer among us to shun such a man?"

 

"Poe was here?" Disappointment clouds Finn's usual smile. He welcomes any chance to see his best friend, the Frenchman who fought on the American side in their War for Independence, and then managed to bargain freedom for Finn. From what she knows of politics, Rey is uncertain why Poe or Finn, both former enemies of England, are allowed in the country at all—but then again, Poe is a man of many faces. His close friendship for the last few years with the Duchess of Organa may have something to do with his ability to walk at liberty on English soil.

And as for Finn? Finn is, unofficially, the second ward of Lady Maz—and unlike Rey, Finn waits for no mysterious family to return and find him. He looks forward, always forward, and if Rey can be half as noble as he, half as cheerful in the face of adversity, she thinks she will have made a good life of it indeed.

Not that this is adversity. Rey unwinds a corded curtain tassel from her fingers and realizes that she has been fading from the conversation.

"Baron Snoke," Finn says again. "An invitation?"

"A challenge, maybe," Lady Maz offers, with a wry smile. "He is a wealthy and important man, and he likes to be known as such. Though until we go, we cannot know what social nicety he is bending to his will by the introduction of his protégé."

"So, we're going?" Finn shoves his hands in his pockets. His face telegraphs all that Rey feels; excitement, and a twinge of something else.

"Yes." On that point, Lady Maz seems immovable. She sweeps out of the room, muttering to herself, and leaves Finn and Rey blinking at one another.

 

There are conversations that go on behind the closed doors of Lady Maz's parlor; Rey knows this. She has seen Poe come in and out at late hours. Once there was blood on his face and he held his arm against his side as though it pained him.

There are secrets on the roads between London and these country manors. Some of them involve Baron Snoke, or his mysterious protégé, a young man whom Baron Snoke and his son Huxley met abroad and brought back to England. There are secrets around the bloody uprisings in France, secrets about the mysterious Duchy of Organa. These secrets are to be held like playing cards, but Rey has never been very good at cards. She keeps her own counsel and trusts to Poe's good heart, to Lady Maz's kind eyes.

Finn, though. Sometimes, as now, the afternoon of Poe's visit, his brow scrunches up when he and Rey wander through the maze of gardens, and he shifts in his pale linen coat as though it does not fit him. As though this was not exactly what he was looking for when he went in search of freedom.

"There's something stirring," Finn tells her, as they sit on the lawn one afternoon. His nimble fingers pluck at the grass, pulling up whole tufts.

"A ball," Rey says, and sighs. She is not sure that her dancing will be what it should.

"Not the ball. Lady Maz…and Poe bringing the invitation. I just—"

Rey recalls the loaded glances exchanged. "I know," she says. "But it's larger than we are." She shrugs. An ant is crawling across the straw furrows of the bonnet beside her; she flicks it off.

"Poe has friends who died in the Revolution," Finn answers. "He told me. It's a damnable shame."

"Power breeds war," Rey says softly, and he looks at her in surprise. "What? I read."

"I know you do." Finn's velvet eyes warm to hers. "And you know that I'm all for uprising against oppression. Hell—sorry. I mean, I fought for a war that wouldn't free me, because it would free some. But I'm on Poe's side—it's gone too far, in France."

"What are you saying, then?"

"I think Poe's helping a resistance of sorts. Smuggling out the innocent."

If Rey has _not_ thought that before, she is not surprised. "What of it? I think him a good man, and—"

Finn's hand closes over hers, earnest and sudden. "I'm not questioning it, Rey. I wish I could help him."

Rey wishes for her family. She wishes for home, and she wishes that there were no secrets, but sometimes she feels as helpless as Bébé, trotting at the heels of greater minds. All of a moment, she is tired of that.

"If they have a plan at the ball, Finn," she begins slowly, and then continues in an urgent whisper, "We'll watch. You and I, Finn. We'll watch, and we won't wait on the sidelines any longer."

Finn's face breaks into a grin. "I hope you have a pretty gown, in case we need a distraction."

 

There is plenty of distraction in the days that follow. Lady Maz says nothing of what she and Poe might be planning to learn or to tell at Baron Snoke's ball; instead, it is the seamstress who comes up from the village in a laden carriage, bearing bolts of silk and georgette and mousseline.

"The latest style," she assures them, measuring under Rey's bustline. "They call it the _empire_ waist."

 

The candle sconces are red glass, blown soap-bubble thin. The light casts the room in a rosy glow; the shadowy corners are made eerier by a darker blush.

Rey holds a wine glass stem between slippery silk fingertips, conscious that she must not do anything to sully the gossamer folds of her dress, the pristine white of her gloves. Somehow, she has managed to get herself quite alone in this massive ballroom.

Finn is nowhere to be seen; Poe is across the room, his lush velvet coat effortlessly rumpled, his expression enticing. The ladies are, to a one, enticed. Rey smiles to herself, forgetting her consciousness, her faint discomfort at the prospect of so many eyes upon her. If there are secrets to be told tonight, it shall be difficult to trade them in front of such an audience. She is intrigued to know how Poe plans to do it.

Bébé is the star of his little entourage, a provocative little guest curled demurely at his feet with a giant paper bow around her neck, giving the admiring ladies an excuse to speak to Poe.

 _Perhaps we were foolish, and he is only here to flirt_ , Rey reflects, still gripping her wineglass. But then again, she has seen a bright fire in Poe's fierce eyes, in moments when he thinks no one is looking. He is a man of action. Finn's instinct is right; her instinct is right. Poe and Lady Maz are not at this party for pleasure.

The music stills—Baron Snoke, fashionably late to his own fete, is entering the ballroom. Necks crane; Rey settles one hand against the pleated, heavy silk of her high sash, and cannot help but stand on tiptoe to try and see for herself.

Baron Snoke is dressed in black brocade, with a powdered wig on his head. The lower half of his face is twisted and gnawed away as though it has been burned. Rey is struck with horror and pity, and then a half-second later, the realization that no one would ever dare draw attention to it.

His son Huxley is thin and keen-eyed, with hair as red as a fox's and features that are foxlike, too. Beside him is a tall young man, dressed all in black, but Rey cannot see him very well.

The music begins again, a torrent, an imperial march. It bowls Rey over with its opulence and its beauty—it is dark, too, and she feels as though those blushing shadows have all but swallowed up the rosy lights at the center of the room. Her dress, pale blue and unbedecked with jewels, seems like a single candle held aloft, whispering out.

"Rey," Finn breathes, close by. "I think we're supposed to dance." He holds out his hand, and she sets aside her wineglass and takes it, grateful for something to do.

"Have you seen Mr. Dameron behave strangely?"

"No." Finn huffs a sigh. "Other than charming every woman in the place, which I can never seem to accomplish."

Rey laughs. "Here. I'll take the next watch on him." The song ends, and Rey is not sorry—it had hurt something in her heart, to hear music so grand—and she floats through the crowd more purposefully this time, trying to get close to Poe.

He is in a knot of men and women, the men trying to divert the women's attention and the women marveling at Bébé's tricks. Poe seems almost lazy, one buckled shoe flat against the wall as he leans, seemingly unaware of how he is orchestrating the whole frenzy.

Rey hangs back, and hears the threads of another conversation.

"How can you say so, sir?" booms a man in a grey felted coat. "Demmed if I'm a romantic, but surely—"

Rey is a romantic, so she has lost sight of her mission for a moment. After all, won't it look all the more curious if she is intently watching Poe? She needs a distraction.

(Of course, Finn said that she should _be_ the distraction.)

Another voice answers. The speaker has his back turned, so all Rey can see is an impossibly sleek black moire coat, the red light dancing on the sinuous pattern of the watered silk. His voice is deep and cultured and _rough_ , and it sends a shiver down Rey's spine.

"I don't believe in it," he says, dismissively.

"Believe in what?" The words have left her lips before she can help herself.

There is a faint hush—the music may still be chorusing all about them, but apparently her voice has found ears.

"Love at first sight," the man in the black coat says, with an added layer of disdain, and he turns.

Rey sees thick, dark hair falling rebelliously over a poet's high brow. The plane of his cheekbones is soft, but so long that it makes his face distinctive. His lips _are_ romantic; full and bowed, but Rey is only struck by how utterly she disagrees with him.

"Well, I do," she retorts. She loved her family at last sight, to be sure—but she loved Poe Dameron at first sight, with his rakish grin; she loved Maz at first sight for her solid generosity; she loved Finn at first sight for the honesty behind his eyes. And if these gaggle of pompous young men are speaking of romantic love—what of it? She cannot doubt that the heart is capable of knowledge before time, in this as in everything else.

The lights are gloomily red, the music is haunting, but Rey has quite forgotten to be overwhelmed.

She has also only now noticed that the young man before her has gone a shade paler (rendering his features almost alabaster) and is staring at her as though he has never seen another human before.

Looking around, Rey thinks, _perhaps he never has_.

"Sir Ren, pay no heed to her—" blusters one of his friends, but he lifts a lean, elegant hand to dismiss them. Rey's heart stops in her chest.

Sir Ren. _Kylo Ren._ The mysterious protégé of Baron Snoke. Rey swallows. Because neither Poe nor Finn nor Lady Maz are beside her, she stands her ground. There seems nothing else to be done.

"You know something about love?" he asks, as intensely as if his life depends on it.

"Everyone can know something of love, even if they only hunger for it," Rey answers. "At least, so I believe."

"At least," he murmurs, moving infinitesimally closer. His eyes burn, but not like Poe's eyes burn. There _is_ hunger here, hunger and darkness and something that Rey, knowing what she does of fear, might call fear…but she cannot be certain. "You speak very freely of what you believe."

"I don't see why I shouldn't." Rey tugs at her gloves. "Belief in the right things—it is the strongest force in the world, I think."

"And do you," he says, his lips forming each word vividly, "Believe in the right things?"

"I hope so." Over his shoulder, she can see that Poe has disappeared. She _has_ been distracted—and maybe distract _ing_ , but she cannot be sure. "Excuse me, please."

 

Poe is on the other side of stained glass doors, standing in the curve of a balcony. His smile is one of immense satisfaction, and he has Bébé curled up in his arms.

"What happened to her bow?" Rey asks.

Poe laughs for a long moment. Then he says, warm and amused, "She…lost it."

The bow was a message. Rey missed it; she missed the moment of truth. "I know you're hiding something," she whispers, fists balled up against her hips.

"Yes," Poe whispers back, with a little quirk of his eyebrow. "Yes, Rey, I am."

"Finn and I are going to find you out."

His smile fades, and his face is almost grim. "Rey—I don't keep secrets for my own entertainment. You and Finn…"

"Want to help." She reaches up, as she knows all the ladies wanted to, and presses the satin palm of her glove against his cheek. "We're not children anymore, Poe."

But all the same, she falls asleep in Lady Maz's carriage on the way back to the estate.

 

Poe Dameron leans forward, poking at the embers of the parlor fire. He broods, knowing that he does so. Bébé is on his lap, spreading white and ginger hairs over his smoking jacket.

"I have never understood your name for that creature," Lady Maz says. She is wrapped in a robe over her evening gown. She pours him tea in a cup and wine in a glass. Poe drinks the wine first.

"I know you know your French," Poe grins. "But—it is true, she is no infant. One of my best men."

"Exactly."

"I received an offer of new recruits today," he says, after a moment. "Rey, and Finn."

"They see much." Maz presses her hands to her temples. "And I see much. And what I see—I would fear for them."

They do not say what they have long suspected. That Snoke, not content with reaping the fortunes of the British aristocracy, has begun to systematically feed wealthy French to the Guillotine, plucking the treasures left behind from their empty manors. That Snoke does not shed blood for revolutions, but for greed.

"They are eager." Poe finishes his wine.

"They are young."

"So was I. And so is Sir Kylo Ren, the mysterious heir apparent to Snoke's legacy, if not to his estate." Poe half-smiles. "By the way—Rey did what I could not have imagined or directed, tonight."

"And what was that?" Maz lifts an eyebrow.

"She distracted."

 

The room is bare, all paneled ebony and marble parquet floors, and darkness, darkness, darkness. The tiles swim before Kylo's eyes as he reels back, stunned by Snoke's blow.

"You failed."

" _I_ could have easily succeeded, father," Hux interjects, but Snoke only sneers in his direction.

"The ease of the task for Kylo does not indicate its simplicity for _you_." He rises, and Kylo sets his jaw, waiting for another fist to rattle his teeth. "What diverted your attention from our friend Monsieur Dameron? We cannot intercept his infernal messaging system if we do not see him deliver the message."

He does not know why he says it, but that is the mystery of Snoke—he never knows why he does anything. "A girl."

Snoke's tattered and twisted and lips curl back, revealing what remains of his teeth. "A girl? What girl?"

"I did not know her." _Ah, but if only that were all—_

Snoke's gaze is unreadable. "I shall speak to you again in the morning," he says. He lifts his wig off and casts it to his desk, and stalks out of the room.

Kylo stands very still, his head high. He will not look at Hux. His cheek and mouth still sting.

"About time you felt it too," Hux hisses in his ear, and slams out of the room.

Kylo wonders, almost for the first time, if this is why Hux's smile is crooked. He touches the blood on his lips. He is angry at Snoke, and that is what will return him to Snoke's good graces. It is always his anger that burns the brightest, casting the longest shadows and setting his talents, such as they are, in sharp relief.

His own room is rich with fur and velvet and heavy curtains that stretch from floor to the rings set in the ceiling molding. It is ten times more beautiful than Hux's room, but tonight it feels cloying. Kylo strips off his coat, then his vest, and flings himself upon the four-poster bed.

 _A girl_...all bright eyes and a filmy dress, a firm jaw and words that rent his heart. Why is it always so easy to reach his heart? He rakes his fingers across his chest, as though he could punish the faithless organ. As though—

But no. Not tonight. He cannot go back, he will not. He will not be led there by the silk-gloved hand of a girl whose name he does not know.

He does not even know her name. Snoke would kill him for it if he knew, but that is Kylo's greatest regret of the evening.

He tumbles over, hand clenching in his too-soft pillows. In his dreams, a voice echoes:

_These are your first steps._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist adding to this. Hopefully it will conclude in about two or three chapters.

Rey is barely breathing. Beside her, Finn’s hands are clenched around his knees, creasing his breeches. Poe lounges before them on one of Lady Maz’s high-back chairs, but there is nothing playful about his eyes.

“I am following my heart here,” he says. “And my heart has never served me.” His fingers toy with Bébé’s collar—his lips are cynical, and Rey thinks of the tiny silver locket that hangs from Mr. Dameron’s watch-chain. Does he have a past too? (Does not everyone?)

“We want to fight,” Finn says. “Poe, you know me. I can fight.”

“I know.”

“And Rey,” Finn urges. “Rey can fight too. She—she is so clever, and fast, and just—she’s _everything_ , Poe.”

Rey feels her cheeks flush a little.

“I do not doubt your valor,” Poe says. “I only doubt whether I can bear it, if either of you should—”

“We are on English soil,” Rey says. “Truly, Poe. Can you not entrust us with little errands? Even the kind you would give to Bébé. But Finn and I can’t stand by while you alone are saving people. We are not children anymore.” She bites her lip; she hopes it is not something a child would say.

Lady Maz’s fireplace crackles warmly; it throws pagan shadows on the leather-bound books in the library.

The flames dance in Poe’s eyes, though there is a fire behind them that is all his.

“Very well,” he says at last. “So you want to join the Force.”

 

It is a long time—months—before Rey and Finn meet many of the other members of the Force. Poe feeds them only the information they need to know, which is often frustratingly little.

Rey transcribes letters into plain block-work (to disguise handwriting). She simpers to the Post, slipping in missives against the back of beribboned letters to imaginary lovers.

She hears bits and bobs and _whispers_ of new villainy, new deaths. How Baron Snoke pulls the strings of purses as well as gallows.

Poe is fascinated by the mysterious Lord Ren.

Rey thinks she understands.

 

Rey has dreams. Most often, they find her at the ball of so many months ago, whirling through a crowd whose chatter intoxicates her, whose music moves her feet to dance to the point of exhaustion. Sometimes she is in a garden, white-pillared, strung with green ivy and heavy with the scent of lonely things.

Always, there is a voice. Deep—tortured—

_Young._

“There. It is finished.” He dashes it across the table—smooth, funereal mahogany—and tips his head back. A challenge. But not much of one. He never dares— _much_.

Snoke does not smile. He only shakes his head. “Your brilliance is as an ember if left untended, Kylo.” The way Snoke says— _that_ name always makes Kylo feel as if it does not belong to him. “This work is good. But never, never finished.”

Hux is likely sneering behind him.

Kylo’s fingers are cramped, stained with ink. In the half-light, the ink is no darker than blood.

 

Rey returns from the Post one day to find Bébé prancing on the lawn. She sinks to her knees, forgetful of her fresh muslin against the spatters of grass. “Hello, little one! What brings you here!”

She hears Finn calling her; his eager steps on the drive. “Rey, Rey! Come here.”

Lady Maz looks older at the head of the table. Poe stands beside her.

Lady Maz says, “You are both called to a council of the Force tonight. Are you ready?”

 _Ready?_ Rey’s heart is beating out of her chest; surely that is the only answer that could be needed.

 

He wakes in a cold sweat, pushing his hair back from his brow. How can it be that he has fallen asleep in early evening, his boots still on his feet?

 _You are tired_ , says a voice in his mind. He curses the voice, but only because it makes him ache. The touch of a hand—was that all a dream too?

Kylo snarls, lifts his saber from the wall, and practices fencing late into the night with a reluctant Hux, as though it will do any good.  

 

Rey watches him, mesmerized—the dandified Mr. Dameron, now all purpose, all precision in voice and movement, though his cravat hangs loosely around his throat, and an errant curl dangles low over his brow. How women must love him! How they must crave a touch, a glance! And all of a moment Rey pities them as she could not have pitied them before. To see only the face, the features—it is nothing. To see the heart of the man displayed—ah! There is fodder for love.

But not for her. She is too young, or she was. And now she is too engrossed in something else. She does not share her soul with Mr. Dameron the way she does with Finn, and her heart has always been her own. There must be someone in the world who seeks both.

Now she wonders if it even matters, for she cannot spare a moment to find him.

“Before us is the most urgent mission of our career,” Poe says. “Long have we tried to determine how to stay one step ahead of this bloody revolution, and of the man in our midst who aids it along. Now, thanks to much sacrifice—much effort—we have discovered that Baron Snoke keeps a ledger. This was revealed by the Erso detachment.”

Every head bows for a moment. Rey’s throat tightens. She can feel tragedy in the room, without knowing the reason why. “No one—no one living—has seen this ledger. But it is believed that Snoke keeps account of where best to exert his deadly pressures. Remember that bloodshed is a business enterprise, for him. And of late, the heads roll all the faster—some of the best families in France, laid low with a crook of Snoke’s finger. And all while his coffers fill with the rewards of their pillaged estates.” Poe’s fist strikes the table. “Gentlemen—and lady”—this last to Rey—“I have watched closely. Only one recent change to Baron Snoke’s ensemble can explain how this ledger might have become more powerful a weapon than ever. Only one person with the requisite knowledge of France. Only one with such a grasp of strategy, such a mind for accounts. A political mind, one might say.”

“Lord Ren,” Finn murmurs, not quite speaking up. But other voices echo it for him. Lord Ren remains a shadow, but a darker one each day. He is not some simple protégé; not anymore.

“No surprise there, considering his lineage.” One of the grizzled veterans says that, and Poe does not affirm it—his lips merely twist in a grimace.

“His lineage?” Rey asks. “What of Lord Ren’s lineage?”

“He is my son.”

The door has opened. The voice that spoke is unlike any woman’s Rey has ever heard. She does not know why she should recognize the speaker, but immediately, she knows that it can only be the Duchess of Organa. No empire waists for her—she wears the fashion of twenty years earlier, but the boned bodice of her dress is dark wool, not brocade, and her only jewelry is a wide silver band on her finger.

“Madam.” Rey curtsies low; even in the economy of such a meeting as this, everyone bows.

“Kylo Ren was not always the man he is today.” The Duchess’s face is still, almost impassive. “But alas, his training in languages, in numbers, in strategies—they serve him well. Mr. Dameron, I believe, is correct. My son is the mysterious keeper of Snoke’s ledger. No doubt the mind behind it.” She squares her shoulders, and Rey sees traces of beauty in her lined face, in her deep eyes. “The mission before us is not for the faint of heart. It may take you to France, to the blade of the guillotine itself. Or it may take you somewhere nearer, but no less deadly: once within reach of Baron Snoke’s treacherous grasp, even my influence may not be enough to assist you.”

“What is the mission?” It is Rey who speaks, the clear sound of her own voice surprising none more than herself.

Poe’s eyes, as they meet hers, are kind despite the grim set of his jaw. “We must steal the ledger,” he says. “And know its secrets—every name, every number—before we destroy it.”

 

 

“Another ball?”

“Yes, Rey.” Lady Maz adjusts her spectacles. “It is one of Poe’s favorite places to pass messages. And the usual suspects will be present. Poe has questions that guests there may answer. Why do you think he attends so many parties?”

“I want to fight, not dance.” Rey stops just short of saying that she has been practicing her fencing with Finn. She is getting very agile with a blade. She imagines whipping one out of her stocking, something retractable perhaps, and pressing it against the tendons of Lord Ren’s throat, close enough to kiss—

Kill. She meant _kill_ , although she does not exactly want to kill anyone.

“I think you will wear green this time,” Lady Maz muses, lifting up a length of ribbon. “Green as the grass, and flowers in your hair…”

Rey frowns. “I am not a doll.”

“No,” Lady Maz says, and she sighs. The ribbon falls from her small hands. “No, Rey. Anything but.”

 

“Another ball?”

Snoke’s eyes bore into him. “Society is power. And last year, you failed so very miserably. Need I remind you?” He raises a hand; Kylo does not, _will_ not flinch.

“Mr. Dameron is on the invitation list.” Hux’s voice is like a tatter in oiled silk; all desperate threads. “One of us will crush that viper, Ren. But dancing gloves come before blades. Do you not know?”

“Silence, Huxley.” Snoke shoots him a venomous glance, and Hux _does_ flinch. “We will tread with care among this flock of sheep. Some say the Duchess of Organa may make an appearance.” He tilts his head, so that his withered flesh folds grotesquely against his starched collar. “Are you ready for that?”

“The name of Organa means nothing to me,” Kylo answers. His hands are in fists, but thank heaven (or hell) his voice does not shake.

Later, he will find blood on his palms where nails bit flesh.

 

Finn’s jaw drops.

“Finn, you have to stop doing that! It makes me feel foolish, to see you stop in your tracks so.”

He lifts a black and gold mask to his eyes. “There. Let this blind me a little.”

Rey’s mask is silver. She fixes it lightly over her eyes, letting the ribbon that ties it slip between the coils of her hair. “Finn, I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

“I know that Poe asked me to pass messages for him, but I also…I think I can get close to Lord Ren. I think I can find something out about the ledger.”

Finn chews his lip. He is rolling his white gloves from hand to hand. “Rey, I don’t think…”

“It was you who first suggested I distract, when all of this began.”

Finn shakes his head stubbornly. “Distraction isn’t a death wish.”

“It might have been this time.” She covers his hand with hers. “I told you so that you’d be there to watch out for me. I trust you won’t do anything to stop me.”

“I’d do anything to save you,” he answers, and she knows that it is both an agreement and a promise.

 

Rey is practically in despair. She has passed on Mr. Dameron’s messages behind the flit and flutter of her fan, but her own personal mission seems fruitless in results. The ballroom is awash in spangles and crystal glasses and men’s pale flowered coats.

It is the grandest ball so far this year, or so she has heard—and the mysterious Lord Ren is nowhere to be seen.

“Would you care for a dance?”

Rey is absent-minded in her searching, so much so that she does not realize that the voice is the one that haunts her dreams, so much so that she answers before she turns.

“Thank you, sir, but I do not dance.”

“A pity.”

It is Lord Ren. His eyes are behind a black mask, but she would recognize the sloping lines of his face, those full lips, anywhere.

Rey is speechless. “Lord Ren!”

“You remember me.”

“I saw you…at the Baron’s…”

“I remember _you_.”

“Well. I am very memorable.”

His voice roughens a little. “You interrupted me among my friends. Who would forget?”

“ _You_ were talking nonsense, what other choice did I have?” And _oh_ , Rey could just _pinch_ herself! Why must she let her gall in the face of male ego get in the way of a mission!

But he only seems intrigued. Perhaps not all is lost. “You are certain,” he says. “About the dance?”

She needs to get him alone. A dance will not _quite_ do it. “I would prefer a walk in the gardens,” she says. “They are very beautiful in the moonlight.”

“Are they?” He sounds young. Young, as he does in her dreams. She reminds herself of the ledger, a cruel and callous and calculating thing. Reminds herself that blood drips from those soft black gloves.

“You may join me,” she says. Then, in a sudden decision—“But no, sir. I did not give you permission to take my arm.” Maybe she doesn’t need to pinch herself. Maybe her distance is what will draw him close.

He follows willingly enough.

 

Snoke is going to kill him. This beauty—this enigmatic, sparkling beauty, in her emerald robe—she will be the death of him. Kylo tells himself that it is no great fault to pursue her; she distracted him last time, which means he can use it to his advantage. That is what he tells himself, even as he compares the white column of her neck to a lily of the valley. Even as he imagines the brush of her skin beneath his fingers, if only she would let him touch her—

But no, she is striding ahead of him, head held high, caring little for what an honor he is bestowing on her. And _that_ is maddening enough. For some reason, he can imagine her in a fencing costume, blade flashing. Imagines the quickening in his veins that such exertion would bring.

They are in the garden. It will not be in vain; Poe Dameron is elusive and mercurial, but if this is his understudy (and Kylo has every reason to believe that it is), there may be another way to victory, to stamping out that hateful Force.

He flexes his hand against his side. He wants to touch her—he wants to kill her, but only because he must kill everything he might let himself love.

(The Duchess of Organa made no appearance tonight.)

(There are still small mercies.)

This woman— _he does not even know her name_ —pauses before a fountain. The moon is shining bright indeed, but Kylo cares not for it.

“What is your name?” he asks, coming up close behind her. Let her feel his warmth. Untouchable, fiery—these are things she cannot own alone.

“I am Rey,” she says. “See, isn’t the moon quite lovely?”

Rey. Of course. A name like starlight. He swallows hard. “What do you think you are doing, Rey? Strolling about gardens with a man like me?” He means it to sound dangerous, which is why it is such a terrible shock when she _laughs_.

“Oh, you have a dastardly reputation? _Do_ tell me more.”

There is nothing to say to _that_ , so he says nothing.

“I do not care for balls,” she says. Her mask is like liquid silver rising above her cheeks, her lips. Suddenly Kylo imagines crushing her against him, tasting that scornful smile that always seems to be playing about the corners of her mouth. Scorn! And yet, sincerity—that sincerity in her voice, her look, _that_ is what keeps him awake at night, all this time.

He forces himself to refocus. This is all for Snoke. All for strategy. He imagines the ink dripping down his fingers, blood dripping down his fingers, and maybe it is his father’s and maybe it is a hundred other’s.

He turns away. “It is cold. I am going back in.”

Rey does not answer in words. She turns to follow him—and she falls.

 

She cannot let him leave. That would defeat everything she has worked for, flirting with him and drawing him out, when what she really wants is to shake the sorrow and bitterness out of his voice, as well as (quite possibly) to let her knuckles connect with his jaw. He is insufferable, and fascinating, and she wanted to dance with him more than she might admit. But _more importantly_ , she wants to know about the ledger.

And now he is leaving.

Rey lets her ankle twist beneath her, and collapses, letting a false cry of pain slip from her lips.

 _That_ stops him. “Rey—are you—”

“My heel turned,” she says. She is used enough to pain to pretend it. “I’m so sorry, I—”

The next moment he has swept her up in his arms.

Rey takes a moment—half a moment—to recover from the shock. She has never been so close to a man before, not even Finn.

His shoulders are broad. He is so tall that he looks lean, but there is firm muscle beneath his frock coat.

“Sir!”

“You must let me help you,” he says, against her hair.

 _Silly girl. You have what you want. He is really, truly close—make use of it!_ She presses a hand against his chest. Yes! She is in luck—oh, moon and stars and deviltry, she can feel a key in his breast pocket.  She lets her head loll against his shoulder, and her fingers slip under his lapel.

(You see, Rey once knew the streets of London. Before Lady Maz, before gowns and grass and freedom, the little girl in the tattered, sand-colored garments picked a pocket or ten.)

 

“What was I _supposed_ to think?”

She has never seen Poe like this. He is storming about, but Rey stands her ground. “I was thinking that if I am to flirt about like a pretty girl, I can make more use of myself than in passing messages.”

“I turn around,” Poe says, mopping his brow with a lace-edged handkerchief—“And there is the infamous Kylo Ren with you in his _arms_.”

“Did you really hurt your ankle?” Finn asks, kneeling beside her and working off her shoe.

Rey waves a hand. “Certainly not. I just needed to get close.”

“You got close,” Poe says, eyes snapping. “Rey, I’m sorry. You had your chance. But this is the last time—”

His voice trails away.

Rey is holding up the key. “I did get close,” she says, very firmly. “And surely… _this_ can be of help to us?”


	3. Chapter 3

For Poe Dameron, to realize is to act. He takes the key from Rey’s hand, and turns it over and over.

He sees the cuts along the blade—no simple shaft, this, and narrows his eyes. There is a set of stars embellished between the grooves. It is half the length of his finger.

Rey is watching him eagerly.

If he was her older brother, he would chide her to be more careful. But he is Monsieur Dameron, and he did not come so far along in life, in conquest, by care.

 

Rey is holding her breath. Perhaps he will throw it aside, tell her that it is but an ordinary key—a chamber key, a stable key, nothing necessary.

Perhaps he will tell her that she is not an asset to the Force.

Mr. Dameron clears his throat. “The first thing we must do,” he announces, “Is make a copy. Lord Ren must not suspect that it is gone.”

Rey rushes for the sealing wax. They melt the wax above a candle flame until it slides lazily across parchment, and then Mr. Dameron presses the slender blade deep into the pool. One side, then the other.

Finn asks the question on everyone’s mind. “How are we going to return it?”

 

Rey’s heart is beating at what _must_ be a thousand paces a minute. The gates are wrought of harsh iron. The knocker is shaped like a gorgon’s head. She has not ventured here before; that long-ago ball was at a great estate in town.

Finn and Mr. Dameron have disappeared into the bushes. Finn will whistle like a bird if she is in danger.

Rey cannot lift the knocker. She raps on the door with her knuckles.

The maid who answers the door is dressed in grey. She stares down. She says, “Madam, may I request a name?”

“My name is Rey Ridley,” Rey answers. “Is Lord Ren at home?”

“Miss Ridley.”

The maid disappears, scuttling to the side, and Lord Ren looms in her place. His shirtsleeves are white against his black waistcoat, against the long, dim shadows that fill the hall behind him.

“I came to thank you,” Rey says. Baron Snoke is not at home; Poe made certain. Baron Snoke is not at home. But she thinks of that mangled face, those serpent eyes, and she suppresses a shudder with difficulty.

Lord Ren looks as though he does not know how to be thanked.

“May I come in?”

He glances behind him. So tall and strong, she thinks. A fencer’s build—more than Mr. Dameron has, though Mr. Dameron is handy with a rapier.

How could this man be afraid of anything?

(She thinks of the light that has appeared in Duchess Organa's eyes sometimes, in rare moments, and wonders how a woman such as she could be sad.)

(And yet.)

“Yes.” He steps aside, sweeps her in with a hand. His hair is less tidy than it was at the ball—it curls around his collar, it falls over his forehead. Rey imagines that it would be silky between her fingers.

“What are you thanking me for?”

There are mirrors all down the length of this hall. Rey sees the reflection of her printed calico, her poke bonnet. She does not belong here. She clasps her hands together. “I twisted my ankle the other night, at the ball, and you assisted me.” She lifts the hem of her dress, and pokes a foot daintily forward, to show the bandages. Finn had told her, unable to meet her gaze, that ankles are rather…of interest.

Sure enough, two points of color appear on Lord Ren’s cheeks.

Rey sweeps her lashes down, then up. “I hope you will permit my imposition. I merely had to—I had to return some sort of grace.” She holds out a thin envelope. “Please accept my calling card, if you should ever wish to take tea at my guardian’s, Lady Maz.”

A dangerous request. But she couldn’t come empty-handed. (That was the reason that she used to ward off Mr. Dameron’s protests.)

He takes it. For a moment, she is half-sure that his lips are trembling. But he folds them shut. “Thank you, Miss Ridley. I am afraid business detains me too often for social calls.”

She nods. “Of course. You must have much to do for the Baron’s estate. It is…beautiful.” The word does not fall convincingly from her lips.

But to her surprise, his own expression twists a little—twists, she thinks, with something like pain. “Beautiful? Not the word I would use.”

“I suppose it is a man’s home,” she says. “And thus it is without…a feminine touch.”

He swallows.

Rey rises. “I have kept you too long,” she says, intentionally hurried. “I will take my leave.” She turns away, and just as she hoped, he springs up beside her, a long stride closing the distance between them. His hand is against her elbow, and it is all Rey needs. The key, she palms into his waistcoat pocket, careful not to press against his ribs.

“Miss Ridley, forgive me.”

 _For what?_ She wants to ask. _Is my name in your ledger?_

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I did not mean…I did not intend to send you away.”

He is a cruel man. A man who writes names in blood as well as ink. And she had the key, but it feels suddenly like the key to his heart. It doesn’t feel _fair_ , and Rey is angry at herself.

“It is only—” He stumbles over his words. “It is only that Baron Snoke does not take kindly to visitors.”

No, Rey supposes. This house of secrets, with the carpets that sink like sand beneath her feet, where the very walls seem to hang with gallows rather than portraits—no, it does not seem like a place that would warrant conversation, or friendship.

“It is no matter,” she says, tilting her head and squaring her jaw so that her gaze meets his like a shot. “I will not come again.”

Yes—there is no doubt of it this time. That is pain on his face.

 

“He did not suspect?” Finn asks, when Rey rides behind him, along the backroads away from Baron Snoke’s estate.

“No,” Rey says, against his shoulder. Finn is solid, so _known_. Why is her chest so taut, then, strung with invisible tethers? “No, I do not think he missed the key.”

Ahead of them, Mr. Dameron smiles white in the last light of the sun. “Very good. The Duchess will be pleased.”

 _Can she ever be?_ Rey wonders. _When her son is—_

When she sees the key, the Duchess of Organa stops pacing the room and stands perfectly still. Her eyes are like her son’s. Rey feels a chill wind around her heart, and pull hard like a puppet’s string.

“The stars on the shaft,” she says. “Stars. Not a mistake, I warrant.”

Mr. Dameron nods. Beside him, Bébé cocks an orange-spotted ear. “You mean…”

“Yes.” The Duchess sighs. She must be nearly sixty, but this is the first time that she has looked old. She turns to the Force, who stand silently by, Finn and Rey among them. “It is time to call upon my brother.”

“Where is he?”

“In Scotland.”

“Wandering the Moors like a mad—” mutters one old man, but the Duchess’s gaze cuts his words short.

“I dare you to finish that sentence in my presence, Sir Quill.”

He subsides.

“I will go,” Poe says. He is already reaching for his cloak, which was jauntily thrown over the back of a chair. “It will be a day’s ride, no more.”

“My brother will not meet you without a letter from me,” the Duchess says. “I must write him first.” She leaves the room. A little hope leaves with her, but not all.

 

They wait two weeks, then three. A letter arrives at last. Rey had thought she might die from waiting—and worse was that others _were_ dying, while the ledger remained unfound.

Twice, she has seen Lord Ren riding. She wonders if it was too great a risk to give him the calling card. But he never calls.

 

Poe is saddling his horse when the Duchess’s carriage arrives at Lady Maz’s gates.

“Mr. Dameron, I’m afraid it cannot be you.”

“What?”

The Duchess’s eyes shift to Rey. Rey, who is playing Bébé, probably looking very much the part of a child.

“He asked for the girl. He will only speak to her if she comes alone.”

Mr. Dameron and Finn both protest, and noisily. But the Duchess will not be swayed.

“The Sky Walker is no threat to Rey,” Lady Maz says. She had moved silently over the gravel, even with her cane. “Let her go.”

“My coachman will take her,” the Duchess assures them. “Rey, will you go?”

Rey cannot look at Poe, at Finn. She nods.

“Master Luke is no longer a man of the world.” The Duchess’s voice is grim. “They call him the Sky Walker, Miss Ridley, because he does little else other than watch the stars, and tinker with clocks.”

“But he’ll know something, about the key?”

“There was a time he knew my son as well as anyone. Or thought he did.” The Duchess sighs, and smooths her hands over the dark plain folds of her skirts. She must have been _young_ once, Rey thinks. Young and all in white. “He will tell us is if it _is_ any use, and what it opens. Of that I feel sure.”

 

Scotland is grey and green and lonely as the wind.

The cottage where the former Duke of Organa spends his time seems quite deserted. Instead, Rey finds him wandering the Moor, with his boots dark to the ankle, dark with the waters of bogs she dares not venture into.

“Sir,” she says. Her voice sounds small out her. “Sir, I am Rey Ridley. I have come—”

He has hooded eyes, a rough beard, and his face is all torment. “I know who you are,” he says wearily. “My sister sent you.”

“I stole this,” she says, holding out the key—careful to keep it in the palm of her white-gloved hand, away from treacherous waters and seeping mud. “I—”

“Then you have seen him?”

He means his—well, his nephew. He must.

“Yes,” she says.

“How was he?”

It is hard to answer. Keeper of the ledger, holding ransoms of so many lives—and yet he also held her in his arms, and she cannot say that all in words. “He is likely very changed from when you knew him,” she answers at last. Likely it is not a mercy.

The Sky Walker—this man with the weary eyes, much paler than his sister’s, than his nephew’s—does not even take the key from her. He turns away, his rough linen coat rippling over his bowed shoulders. “It opens a box,” Luke says. “A safe, of sorts.”

Rey is surprised. A long journey, to Scotland—weeks of waiting, and now _this_? He already knows? “Are you certain?” And when, oh when, has she been so bold?

His eyes are piercing, and Rey’s chest feels drawn tight all over again.

“Quite positive, Miss Ridley. I gave it to him.”

 

The carriage rattles beneath her. It is an Oriental creation, Luke told her, this safe. Oblong, lacquered—but if opened by any other mechanism than its key, it will destroy whatever is within it. That, Rey knows, would never do.

But they have the key.

She has the key. Her fingers curl around it, and she wishes that everything could be so simple.

 

Fourteen more lives lost, in the time she has been gone. There was a summer time where Rey dreamt only of the palest ghosts, where threats such as these were as far off as the shores of France.

But France, Finn reminds her, is so very near.

Her heart beats with blood, and she barely sleeps.

When she does, she finds no peace—only _him._

 

Winter is coming. Poe Dameron rescues a dozen men, and takes a bullet to the shoulder. They must act soon; word has spread that ledger is growing.

He pushes Lady Maz’s healing teas away with a restless hand. “To what end?” He demands. “Once, we thought we kept in step. Now? We fall leagues behind.”

Lady Maz’s bones creak as she takes the chair beside him. Finn and Rey have already gone up to their rooms. They are still young, but she knows that they cannot remain so. “Mr. Dameron,” she says. “Mr. Dameron, you must rest. There will no steps, no leagues, without _you_.”

“The Force is greater than I am,” he reminds her, in a softer voice. “Lady Maz, I think…I am afraid of where our path is leading us.”

“I know where our path leads.” She reaches out and smooths the furrow from his brow. “I knew the day I took in the beggar girl with bright eyes. She will surpass us in heroism. The Sky Walker may be a mad man these days, but he has foresight. He would only speak to _her_.”

There are tears standing out in Mr. Dameron’s eyes. He is not a man to show much emotion—only _passion_ —but here both are mingled, and he dashes a hand across his cheek. “It will end in blood.”

Lady Maz stares at the fireplace, then at the hollow darkness of the glass windowpanes. “It always does.”

 

“Got you!” Rey lands a light tap on Finn’s shoulder. “You’re fortunate I’m no revolutionary, Finn—you’d be dead.”

Finn groans. “You’re too quick on your feet. All that dancing.”

“Dancing! I am a hopeless cause at the _allemande_ , I assure you!”

“But not on the fencing ground.”

Rey twirls her rapier around her wrist, a flashy movement that yes, she can admit, is nothing but vanity. “It would appear not.”

Finn mops his brow, and they go at it again, blades flashing. In the sunset of a winter’s afternoon, the steel turns red and gold, like fire.

“When do you think Poe will make his move?” Finn asks. He is perspiring, still, but not panting. Their endurance is well-matched.

Rey tosses her head, parries and lunges. “How should I know? The estate has been locked. Baron Snoke and—” her voice catches, but she forces onwards—“Lord Ren have both been in Paris. The ledger, no doubt, with them.”

“Then you have not heard.”

They nearly drop their swords. Poe is standing beside them, shoulders thrown back—a scarf wrapped around his high collar. “They returned two days ago.”

Rey is breathing hard. Snow is beginning to fall; the light is almost gone. “What does that mean, Mr. Dameron?”

“It means we make our move. Baron Snoke will hold a banquet this week to celebrate his return. No dancing this time, Rey.”

She does not answer.

Finn says, “We’ll steal the ledger then?”

“I am invited,” Poe returns, with a wry smile. “But alas, I’m afraid that Baron Snoke will…occupy my charms. He has personally expressed an interest in me. No doubt there will be poison in my wine.”

“Then who will steal the ledger?” Rey asks. Her voice is calm, perhaps because she already knows.

The snow settles on Poe’s dark curls. He looks older than he did that day long ago, when Bébé waltzed through the gates at his side, when Rey grew bold enough to begin to ask questions.

And Rey is older too.

Poe meets her gaze, and answers, “You.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for a brief racial slur that is said by a villain and thus by no means endorsed.

On the steps of Lord Snoke’s mansion, Rey’s eyes are drawn to the gorgon knocker. The lamplight burnishes it gold, but the shadows in its hollow eyes are death-dark.

“Rey,” Finn says at her ear, but she presses a gloved palm to his forearm, trying to shake the quaver from his usually firm voice with silk against silk.

“Finn, we each have a part to play.”

And it is not for Finn to know—no, not for any of them—that she feels more like a doll than ever, her waist corseted in ruby-red, the key pinned beneath an elaborate stomacher.

Inside, the shadows of men and silk-clad women, dignitaries and thieves too proud to walk the streets, flit about. It feels like a funeral, only—Rey does not know _whose_.

Through an arched doorway, there is a glimpse of Baron Snoke seated at the head of a long table. Rey remembers that she dared enter here once, alone, and that she comes today on a far more dangerous mission.

The mirrors, however, are the same.

“Miss Ridley.”

His voice is velvet drawn too tight. A fraying thread, an ember trailing flame down into darkness.

“Sir,” she says. Finn and Poe have melted from her side into the crowd, _as they should_ , she reminds herself, _as they should_ , and she is alone. Drape her in silk and jewels, and yet her words are as stilted as ever.

His eyes see too much. Not of her plot, she thinks, but of her soul. “I’ve missed—your conversation,” he says. He always sounds on the verge of violence or confession, or both, but he stands like a knight—every inch restraint.

“It is,” Rey retorts, “So very scintillating.”

His eyebrows lift. “Admit it,” he says, slightly closer. “You came here for me.”

And certainly he cannot believe that, but also, he must. The alternative is too dangerous, even if it is an alternative he already knows. _Blood on his hands, on his ledger_ — _remember, Rey. He knows. These are your first steps, and any step could be your last_. _Remember the mission._

“I think you’re being too forward for a gentleman,” Rey says, tilting her chin the way Poe has often instructed her drives men _wild_.

Judging from the flush rising in Kylo Ren’s pale cheek, the tilt has its desired effect. “I think,” he counters, “That you expect too much of a gentleman.”

He is tall and lean and yet impossibly broad of shoulder. He is frozen and awkward at some moments; deadly and sure of himself at others. His hands would dwarf hers. A sudden flash that is unwilling of mind and yet very, very willing of spirit crosses Rey like a blade: cold fingers tangling in hers, and heated lips—

“Pray excuse me,” she says. “They are all going into the dining room. This _is_ a banquet, isn’t it?”

He follows her.

There is a meal. Tortured little birds in glistening sauces and sabers of asparagus. Rey signals Poe with her eyebrows; Poe is laughing at something a shrew-faced dame is saying, but his eyes slide down to where Lord Ren is stabbing at his meat and watching Rey.

Rey is too distracting. That is the message.

 

First she came to him as an angel of light, in simple garb and without anything distrustful behind her eyes. Now she is vengeance in scarlet. His hands clench against his knees. Nothing distrustful, and yet so much danger—

He feels lonely, a child again, as he feels every day, but never admits.

This is a feast, but it is has been long since he knew any victory.

In red, she destroys him.

 

Poe watches her down the length of the table, alive in this dying place, this sarcophagus of covetous greed, and thinks—

No. He does not think. He _regrets_.

Snoke’s eyes are on him, pin-pointed like a serpent’s. Snoke laid a trap and Poe must bring bait. Nothing wagered, nothing gained, and all that.

The bullet is gone from his shoulder, but the wound still aches. That is the way of the world.

Poe rises from the table first, leading the men to the roaring fire in the drawing room (a room hung, absurdly, in black velvet) and to the clink of icy glasses.

Poe’s bourbon is poisoned, as was his wine, so he only pretends to drink it.

“You are bold, coming here,” hisses the red-haired Huxley, and Poe rests an elbow on the mantel. Snoke is patient; his son less so. “I have business with your father,” he says. “Not you.”

“What business?”

Poe grins as brightly as he can. “Do the words Sky Walker mean anything to you?” A pause, a space like a finger dropping from a trigger. “I thought not.”

It is a gamble. Hux simmers in every step towards his father; his father’s ruined brow darkens and he shoots Poe death in a glance. Death, and curiosity. Snoke is a man of business, after all.

Across the room, Ren turns away from watching Rey. For a moment, only, but Poe prays it is enough.

 

Rey’s palms are slick with sweat, and it takes some doing, bunching the fabric in her hands. The staircase winds like an eel, some sick sea-creature or other. Poe had made promises about the map of the house, but somehow she had only been able to steel herself by imagining it in daylight. Here is not even a sunlit window to grant her some forgiving rays.

_Three flights, right turn, down the hall—door on the left, door on the left, aha! Here it is._

Lord Ren’s private chambers. Aside from everything else, the lady in Rey ought to quell from such an imposition. But Rey was a street-thief, and now she is something more, and there is no time for what beats in other girl’s hearts.

She opens the door.

It is a dense room; rich and painfully in order. It does not look lived-in. And that is no surprise, for Rey does not think that Kylo Ren is exactly living.

With a scavenger’s quickness, she rifles through the desk, under the bed, in the wardrobe that seems filled only with black, black, and black.

And at last—the box is small, just as the Sky Walker described it. Rey slides her fingertips against it, feeling for the keyhole. The lacquer, a shimmer of ebony and gold, winks up at her.

The keyhole dimples beneath her index finger. Quickly, she undoes the ribbons that lace in her stomacher, and she slips out the key.

The ledger, when seen, is a simple thing.

Sheets as thin as feathers, crossed by neat, angry script. Page after page of words. Some are names. Some are not. _Most_ are not. Rey turns it round and round, but she cannot make sense of it.

Her heart sinks in her chest. _Code_.

 

Downstairs, Poe is smiling angelically. Finn can see Snoke’s fingers twitching from where he stands by the fireplace. Finn wonders how Poe can bear that lantern-jaw three inches from his face.

Finn wonders, stomach twisting as does not befit the _brave_ —as brave he must be—if this is the night they all die.

Where is Rey?

Damn it all, where is _Ren_?

 

Doing up her bodice required Maz’s assistance the first time. Rey chews her bottom lip, lets a stream of curses run through her head, and tugs at the ribbon, leaning against the wide desk for support.

The door opens.

Kylo Ren looms over her.

Rey gapes like a startled songbird. Rather like, she fears, one that was eaten for dinner.

His brow darkens and lightens like the shifting of weather that she has not foresight to see. _Sky Walker_ crosses her mind, inexplicably.

“Rey,” he murmurs. “I mean—” he draws himself up to imposing height. “Miss Ridley. What brings you here?”

“I was looking for you,” is Rey’s inane response.

His voice takes another turn—lower. “In my chambers? Are you trying to seduce me?”

She is all-too-suddenly aware of how this looks: undone bodice and a dark bedroom. Even though the fault is almost entirely hers, she is suddenly infuriated. How dare he! She may be no lady, she may have begged and stolen her bread in London streets, but she is not his to touch, nor to dream of—if indeed he dreams at all.

“No!” she exclaims, indignant.

He is not deterred by her, not anymore. He crosses the distance between them. His hand is broad—from finger to thumb he spans the breadth of her gilded stomacher, pressing against her, branding her. He leans forward and she can lean no further back; they are bound to collide. Stars in the same orbit, and something more dangerous than a star shining from his dark eyes.

His lips are close, parted. His breath is warm on her cheek and his other hand tips her chin up towards his.

And where is her indignation now? Rey cannot speak. Finn would tell her to punch him, and Poe would tell her to never let anyone get so close.

Then something changes. The lust behind his eyes turns to longing, and then to loneliness. How a face could flicker through so many expressions in so short a moment, Rey does not believe she has earned the right to understand. She pushes him away firmly, and he lets her. But in her movement, her elbow strikes the desk. The box—the Sky Walker box—topples to the floor.

It springs open, shell-empty.

Lord Ren’s face changes yet again.

 

“You are very bold, Monsieur Dameron, to taunt me with the location of Luke,” Baron Snoke says. He would curl his lip, except that there is not very much lip left to curl. “And you have not even finished your bourbon! For shame.”

“My fear, sir,” Poe ripostes, as though he is not dueling with a viper, “Is that the bourbon would finish _me_.”

Devil take this death’s head. _Where is Rey?_

Across the room, Finn is shaking his head. Poe juts his chin a little. _Go look for her_.

Finn disappears.

 

“What have you done with it?”

Rey’s eyes move to the empty box, back to his face, which is drawn with anger. “I’m only a girl—”

“You’re not a girl. You’re a fiend. Haunting my every—” His voice breaks away, but surges back with renewed vigor. “If I call for the Baron, your life will end.”

Rey’s life almost ended in gray winter, before Maz found her, huddled on a church stoop. Rey’s life—it is nothing if it is not lived.

She sets her lips shut.

“Rey!” A hoarse whisper, somewhere down the hallway.

Her heart rises in her throat. _Finn_.

In one smooth motion, Kylo draws a pistol from his jacket. It gleams in the half-light. “Call out his name, and he dies,” he says.

Finn’s voice is coming closer. “Rey!”

Rey’s hands knot in hateful silk. “No.”

Kylo’s features harden. He looks like marble. Nothing like the Duchess of Organa, nothing like any other person she has ever known. “Perhaps he dies anyway.”

In another few bounds, Finn will be before this door.

“Please.” She whispers it, but the word seems to swell in the air, borne up by hope. “I’ll put it all back—call it a draw, if you’ll let us go.”

“A draw?” his eyes spark. “This is life, not chess.”

“I only want to save the people I love.”

The gun trembles in his grasp. “You love him? Then his life must surely end, and at my hand.”

What can he mean? Surely this closeness—the heat of his hand against her waist, that look in his eyes—all this is the fevered exchange of enemies, passing in a moment. Lust to longing cannot mean so very much, not for him, even if she does not yet understand. He is a monster—has he not shown himself so time and again?

“He is like a brother to me,” Rey grinds out, quiet so that Finn will not hear. “Have you never felt love in your heart? Have you never burned— _burned_ at the thought of losing someone you love?”

Finn passes by the door. “Rey! Rey!” fades down the corridor.

Kylo stumbles back a step. The gun droops in his hand, but Rey still feels as though it is drawn and ready. The room is close and velvet-dark around them, but she can see the ghostliness that suddenly drains his face. “It was our first meeting, do you remember?” His voice is hoarse. “I told you I did not believe in love.”

“I did not know—”

“And why wouldn’t you? You, captivating. Free. Loved as no other creature in this diseased world is loved—”

“You overstep,” Rey interrupts, suddenly stung. Loved, yes, by Finn and Poe and Lady Maz—but cared this reprobate for any of it? “If you are not going to kill me, then you should let me go.”

“Let who go?”  

 

He spared the wretched boy who loves her as more than sister, and he hates himself for it. He would kill Huxley now, standing like an avenging gremlin—if such a thing could be found—in the doorway of _his_ chambers, whereto Huxley has never before dared come.

“What are you doing here?” he snaps, and slips the gun beneath the folds of his frock-coat before Huxley’s weasel eyes can see it.

“I followed one of _their_ people up here,” Huxley simpers. “The blackamoor.”

Rey lunges at him. Kylo catches her with one arm and wrestles her against him. Just when he thinks he has mastered his own turmoil regarding her, she goes and does something so heroically _stupid_ and unexpected—like defend the boy she loves _like a brother, like a brother, that’s what she said_ —when her own life is in danger.

“Tut, tut,” Hux murmurs. His gaze drops to the open box. “This was quite a heady rendez-vous, Ren, or else you’ve caught yourself a crimson spy.”

( _In red, she destroys him_.)

Rey is breathing fast against him. She is soft and hard and so far, far from ever being his. He rests his lips against her hair for the space of half a second. Then he says, “I’ve caught a spy. Call Snoke.”

 

She does not know where her friends are. Rey’s head lolls like a ragdoll when she wakes from some kind of drugged stupor—no proud porcelain, not anymore, and she cannot move her wrists. By wrist and ankle and something that looks like curtain-cords, she is bound to the highback chair that now faces out from Kylo Ren’s desk.

She does not know where her friends are.

The house is silent. Rey remembers the long mirrors, remembers the cloying scent of mothballs, remembers how nothing is darker than Snoke’s smile and Kylo’s eyes.

 _I failed,_ she thinks, frantically. _I failed the Force, and the Duchess, and Finn and Poe—oh, Finn._

Footsteps echo, nearer, nearer.

Huxley appears first. “The rebels are in the wine cellar, father,” he says. His enunciation, as ever, is odiously crisp. “We await your command to kill.”

Snoke does not speak as he enters the room. The wig is askew above his twisted features, but Rey does not think she has ever seen anyone so unmoved by time or tide or tyranny.

“Let them stew a bit,” he says, “And we’ll skewer them soon enough. For now, I want to know what she knows.”

Behind him, Lord Ren is in shadow. Rey wonders if he wanted to betray her, and wonders still more if it matters.

 

“Poe, we’re going to die.”

Poe, grim and smelling of spilled bourbon, is working at the knots binding his wrists. There is a slash of blood above his eye.

“No,” he says. “We’re not dead until we’re dead.”

 

“Leave us, Huxley,” Snoke says. Huxley opens his mouth and shuts it again. He departs, with a hate-filled sneer in Kylo’s direction.

Kylo has seen it often enough.

This, he has never seen: his whole heart, with wide brown eyes and a set jaw, trussed like a lamb for slaughter.

Before this, he realizes—he had not known he still _had_ a heart.

_Traitor, traitor--_

Murderer.  

 

The point of Snoke’s dagger is against her throat. Rey shuts her eyes; feels it drag through silk, tracing a narrow line down her sternum. She wants to shy away, but the slightest move could be fatal. As it is, the cruel tip breaks skin.

“Here,” he says, satisfied. His crumpled fingers brush against her skin as he draws out the ledger. “Every page, right beside her heart. What think you of that, Kylo?”

Kylo is staring at the ground. He says nothing. Maybe it would hurt him to look at her. It hurts Rey to look at him.

“It’s not too late,” she says, even though her muscles are cramped and her chest is burning. “It’s not too late. Ben, that was your name, wasn’t it? Ben Solo. It’s not too late.”

He is shaking. Every inch of him, and Snoke’s eyes become more dangerous because he recognizes _her_ as a danger.

He tilts his head. A new tack. “These are pretty words, little bird. But what would you say,” Snoke’s voice slithers around her, like a noose laid around her ribs, “To a man who killed his own father?”

Horror brims up in Rey like dark wine. But it is no good, no good at all, to drown herself in her own feelings. The look on Kylo’s face is enough to tell her the truth and to tell her far more than that: it is a fierce, animal pain and she suddenly realizes she has earned the right to understand his loneliness.

She does not answer Snoke. Instead, she turns her face towards Kylo. “Did he love you?” she whispers.

His gaze springs to her as though drawn by force. It must not have been the question he was expecting.

“What?”

Snoke strikes her across the face, but it is Kylo who winces.

Rey reels, shaking the muzziness from her head. “Did your father love you?”

The cruel points of Snoke’s thumb and forefinger close at the nape of her neck, tightening. He tilts her head back and presses his blade to her throat.

“Speak again,” he says, silken as a spider web, and every bit as monstrous as the creature itself, “And I shall cut out your tongue.”

Rey stays very still. Blood from the cut along her sternum is soaking along the tattered ruins of her bodice. Pain—and fear, is this fear?

“He did.”

Her eyes snap back to Kylo.

“Then you aren’t lost,” she says, quickly but firmly. She must get the words out. “No one is lost when they are lov—” Her voice chokes off in pain as Snoke’s dagger bears down, slicing cruelly and clinically between her ribs.

It _will_ reach her heart, only—

It doesn’t.

Snoke cries out. Snoke, who, she is sure, has never raised his voice above the storm or calm he wished it to be. Snoke stiffens, Snoke crumples, Snoke falls.

For the rest of her life, Rey will not know why she did not hear the gunshot.

It does not matter; the bullet pierced him temple to temple, and the gun falls, in silver smoke and silent gleam, from the hand of Kylo Ren.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A stomacher is a bodice piece in old-fashioned dresses.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for joining me on this ride! This chapter is shorter but I hope it wraps everything up to your satisfaction!

“There,” Maz says. She winds the old bandage around her gnarled hand—it would be a paw, almost, were it not for the heavy rings, and smiles down at Rey. “It’s almost healed.”

Rey prods at her side with testing fingers. The wound still aches, but only a little.

It will leave a scar, but no one will see it.

 

The war is over. The revolution is brought down.

And Poe Dameron is knighted in a court of England, but Rey knows that it was another hand that brought him there.

The one known once as Kylo Ren is somewhere in the New World. He left them directions to break the code, and he broke—he ran—

The Duchess of Organa looks five years older in the space of five months. She rests a hand on Rey’s shoulder when she thanks her, and says, _nobody is ever really gone_.

 

“I think of it sometimes,” Finn says. Bébé is playing in the May grass. Poe is taking his tea with Maz. For all that the world around them looks, this might be a year ago. This might—

“Of what?” The secret is this: Rey already knows.

“That night.”

The night it all went right and wrong at the worst times. The night that Poe and Finn fought against Snoke’s guards, how Poe dueled Huxley with his fists—until Kylo Ren let them go.

Threw them out, really. No one dared to defy the man with the smoking gun in his hand and death written in every line of his face.

His face. Rey sees it more often than she can ever tell Finn, or Poe, or anyone.

 

“He left something for you,” the Duchess says. Snoke’s empire has cracked open like an egg; dark secrets and treason and one protégé-shaped hollow in the middle of it all. _America_.

They will never find him there.

(The Duchess of Organa is holding out a card.)

The card is heavy, the stock of a rich man with nothing to leave but secrets and half-truths. Rey feel a burning between her ribs. It might be the scar, not yet healed.

It might be something else.

She unfolds the card.

In a plain, upright hand, less angry than she remembers, it says only—

 _Let the past die_.

Rey crumples it in her fist.

 

“Do you have nightmares of it?” Rey asks carefully, returning to the present and to Finn.

He scratches between Bébé’s ears with a rueful look on his face. “Yes. But we made it out. When we were in the wine cellar, Rey—I was mostly worried about _you_.”

Rey’s fingers flutter almost guiltily to her chest. Is this a twinge of passion, or of pain? “It was rather touch and go, I’ll admit.”

If she lets herself, she can feel his arms around her, can feel him pressing something against her wounds, can feel his lips against her ear.

_Forgive me, Rey. Forgive me._

If she lets herself.

 

No one knows him here.

He is accentless and aimless. He goes by the name of Ben Solo, to punish himself or to prove himself, he does not know. Thankfully—he cannot yet thank heaven—there is enough wilderness here for anyone.

He saved her, he supposes, but only after he betrayed her.

And his father tried to save him, but his answer was betrayal then, too.        

There is only one answer. He puts his head down, and works.

 

“She’ll go after him, one day.”

Poe looks up, surprised. “Do you think so?”

Maz nods. Summer may turn to fall and blood may turn to rain: that is the way of the world.

“She will.”

 

“I don’t understand.” Finn’s hands are locked around her upper arms, not quite embracing her. He looks anguished. Anguished in a way he hasn’t recently, what with the new honors pinned to his jacket and Lady Rose Tico favoring him with many a smile and blush. “You’re leaving?”

“I’m learning.” Rey is almost pleading. “There’s a difference.”

“What are you going to learn in America?”

“I don’t know yet.”

_Whether Ben, son of Organa, can be saved._

 

The passage is gray and grime and salt. The waves are wild and Rey finds that fear and freedom are old, old friends. She is not seasick. She ties up her skirts between her legs and becomes quite indispensable to captain and crew, who give in grudgingly to her insistent involvement.

They teach her checkers and how to rig a sail, and a few curses besides.

 

(“He is lost, Rey. He may have given us aid, but he is lost.”

“Duchess, you were the one who told me that no one is ever really gone.”)

Rey has a map in her hands.

 

Not in Boston, no. He would not seek a city after Paris—of this she feels certain. But Rey gets word of someone named Ben Solo, who has overseen a prosperous farming establishment near some place called _Albany_. They call him a savior of the commonfolk. He has brought food to the bellies of so many. He has raised up the town. He has—

Rey runs because she cannot bear to keep listening, without seeing.

She finds him a field. He is wearing weather-beaten leather and tall boots. His hair blows, tousled back from his brow; his hat is crumpled in his hands.

She thinks he looks like resignation, if he does not quite look like peace.

“Is this how the past dies?” she asks, in as clear a voice as she can manage. “In a potato field?”

No one has ever wheeled round that fast.

 

His house is an open, airy, place. Still sparsely empty, however. As though he does not know yet how to fill it, or with what.

He paces the floor; he stands still. He will not come within ten paces of her. “Who sent you?”

“I sent myself.”

He tilts his head. He is no longer so pale; the summers have tanned his cheeks and his neck. “I am an exile.”

“By whose authority?”

“My own.”

“I see, we are quite the same,” Rey says. She does not mean it to be a taunt. Or maybe she does. Maybe she is _angry_.

He looks different, more rugged, but his eyes are the same. That hurts her more than anything, because she has not seen him in two years, and in those two years she has dreamt of him every single night.

“Rey,” he murmurs. He bows his head, and probably, he has never been closer than now to the son the Duchess of Organa wanted. “Rey, I am trying to make amends—”

Rey crosses the floor with her rolling sailor’s gait. Her right hook—Finn would approve—catches him in the jaw. He stumbles back, blood leaking from his lip.

“That is for running,” Rey says. “You arrogant, cowardly, _pissant_.”

He looks like a man who thought the sun would never rise again.

(He is looking at her like she is the sun.)

Rey seizes his linen cravat in one fist, and jerks him down towards her. It’s a long way down. He is as tall as he ever was in black brocade and treacherous moonlight.

She whispers, “This is for everything else,” and she crushes his mouth with hers.

The sound Ben Solo makes is almost too human—a strangled groan in the back of his throat. Then his hands frame her face as though they have always belonged there. Palm to finger-tip, his are large hands. They tangle in her hair. He opens up her lips with his. She tastes blood. She tastes _him_.

And because he is so much larger than she is, somehow it ends with him taking her in his arms, one slung around her shoulders, the other bearing up her knees. And because she is something far on the other side of angry, she chains her fingers behind his neck and tells him two year’s worth of secrets without saying a single word.

At last, they part for breath. Parting does not have to mean falling apart, Rey realizes. Not now.

“Did you come here to save me?” he asks, setting her gently down, but not quite letting her go. His eyes are flecked with amber. She had never noticed before.

“I came to see if you could be saved at all.”

He traces the crease of her lips with the rough edge of his thumb. “What have you decided?”

There is wilderness here for them both and their unfinished business. There is a broad sky. It is an open promise of a country, and the shadows fall behind them, when they fall at all.

Rey tilts her chin. Poe was right. She can tell that it drives Ben Solo as wild as ever it did Kylo Ren.

“Someday, perhaps, I’ll tell you.”


End file.
